Snobs in the Groves of Academe
Where did academics get the idea that their profession is nobler than others?
continue readingNaomi Schaefer Riley
Naomi Schaefer Riley is the former deputy Taste editor of the Wall Street Journal. She is working on a book called The Faculty Lounges ... And Other Reasons You Won’t Get the College Education You Pay For to be published by Ivan R. Dee.
Articles by Naomi Schaefer Riley
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Snobs in the Groves of Academe
Where did academics get the idea that their profession is nobler than others??
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Interview - Josiah Bunting III
Josiah Bunting III served as superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute from 1995 to 2002. Mr. Bunting previously served as headmaster of the Lawrenceville School, an independent boarding school near Princeton, New Jersey. He also served for ten years as president of Hampden-Sydney College and four years as president of Briarcliff College, a women’s college in Briarcliff, New York. He spent a year at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and three years teaching in the history department at Columbia University.
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Editor's Note
When was the first time you heard the word “loyal” and really understood it?
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Editor's Note
In thinking about this issue of In Character, I have become aware of how frequently people use the term “creative” today. In the last week, I have heard the word employed to describe ways to fix Medicare, variations in fingering on the piano, an applicant for a job in public relations, methods for getting people to buy hybrid cars, astronomers’ strategies for discovering new planets, and a three-point shot in a basketball game. I thought that covered it all until the other day, walking in the streets of Manhattan, I noticed the sign for a new business, “Creative Parking, LLC.” While no one wants his car parked “creatively,” this particular sign was a hint at how far we have “defined creativity down.” Creative now seems to be the adjective we use to describe anything worthwhile or interesting
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Editor's Note
Visitors to countries in the Soviet bloc before the fall of communism – at least those visitors who were honest – used to speak of how drab things seemed there. When they crossed the border into East Berlin, it looked as if they were leaving a color movie and entering a black and white one. This drabness, to their eyes, was not due entirely to the industrial architecture of the Soviet era or even to the technological backwardness of communist societies compared with the free ones next door.
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Interview: Malcolm "Steve" Forbes, Jr.
Malcolm "Steve" Forbes, Jr. is the president and CEO of Forbes Incorporated and president and editor-in-chief of Forbes Magazine. Forbes is the only writer to have won the highly prestigious Crystal Owl Award four times, given by USX Corporation to the financial journalist whose economic forecasts for the coming year proved most accurate. During his 1996 and 2000 bids for the Republican presidential nomination, Forbes's domestic platform included a flat tax, medical savings accounts, a privatized Social Security system, and school choice. He is a longtime champion of the idea that people know better what to do with their money than government does. We talked with Steve Forbes recently about how people actually spend their money and whether they exercise thrift.
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Editor's Note
If you ask someone about thrift, chances are their response will begin with the words, "My grandfather" or "My grandmother." Sometimes it's a crack about how his wallet was so stuffed with coupons he couldn't sit up straight, or how she would unwrap gifts with a view to reusing the paper. Then there are the holes he wore in his jackets after putting them on for thirty years, or the mismatched patches she would use to sew them up. But usually underlying the humor in these anecdotes is an admiration for the way previous generations learned to make do, and indeed, conserved their resources so well that they made possible the comfortable life of their grandchildren.
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